Borland International, Inc. Business Information, Profile, and History

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History of Borland International, Inc.

Borland International, Inc., is the world's third-largest personal computer software company. Founded by a French math teacher who emigrated to America, Borland initially made its mark as a retailer of inexpensive tools for computer programmers, then moved into the market for corporate software. Through its streamlined and unorthodox management style, as well as two major acquisitions, the company grew to rival the largest firms in its field.

Borland was founded in 1983 by Philippe Kahn, who taught mathematics at the University of Nice and Grenoble. Kahn left France for the United States in 1982 with $2,000 in savings and settled in Silicon Valley in California. Unable to get a job because he was an illegal alien, Kahn decided to start his own company to market a software program he had developed. He named the company after seeing a television advertisement starring Frank Borman, the chairman of Eastern Airlines. Kahn thought "Borman" sounded authentically American, so he adopted it for his company, changing the name slightly to avoid confusion or legal difficulties.

Borland's early prospects looked questionable. Among the company's first employees were a former Japanese restaurant manager, a cocktail waitress, and a salesman who had last peddled Campbell Soups in Mexico. Borland employees later described their early business practices as "barely on the right side of the law" in a Wall Street Journal interview. Kahn preferred to think of them as ingenious. Short of money for office equipment, for instance, the company printed up impressive letterhead stationary and sent letters to manufacturers asking to evaluate their products for possible distribution. Dozens of pieces of computer equipment and supplies came flooding in, which Borland used as unofficial loans until the company was better funded.

Unable to attract investment from venture capitalists, Kahn contributed the remnants of his own savings to the new enterprise and rounded up $18,000 from other sources. The company rented a two-room office over a Jaguar garage for $600 a month. In these cramped quarters, Kahn and his employees refined the design for Turbo Pascal, a computer program that made programming in Pascal, a complicated computer language, easier and faster. Turbo Pascal was intended for sale to computer programmers, primarily students in classes from high school through graduate school. After six months, the product was ready to be sold.

Kahn and other Borland employees began to market Turbo Pascal during the day, taking orders, and then filled those orders at night. They priced Turbo Pascal at $49.95, making the cost low enough that the program would be attractive to a wide spectrum of buyers. Soon, Borland found that its product was being purchased by programmers who worked in corporations, as well as students and computer enthusiasts.

Borland's second product was developed in-house as a tool for company employees to simplify their work. Programmers and salespeople found it cumbersome to switch completely out of one computer program and into another when they wished to perform some simple task, such as jotting down an idea or looking up an address. To make this unnecessary, the company designed a desktop organizer, which contained a calculator, a notepad, a perpetual calendar, and a phone directory. This software was loaded into a computer's memory and then could be called up at any time while another program was in use. In June 1984 Borland named this device "Sidekick," and began to sell it to computer users outside the company. As with Turbo Pascal, the company kept the price of the product low to appeal to a wide variety of customers, charging just $49.95 for the package. Sidekick won immediate acceptance, surprising its makers with its popularity. By the end of 1984, the desktop organizer had become one of the three best-selling pieces of software on the market. With this boost, Borland's sales for 1984 reached $10 million, and profits were $1.7 million.

With this success came rapid expansion. The company added new employees and changed offices twice to accommodate its growth. By early 1985, Borland had 100 workers and a 30,000-square-foot headquarters office. By June 1985 company sales were running at $2 million a month, and Kahn had acquired a reputation as the court jester of Silicon Valley for his lavish parties, garish clothing, and impromptu saxophone solos.

In the following year, Borland solidified its reputation as one of the fastest-growing companies in the computer software field. In March 1986 the company introduced Turbo Prolog, a program that used artificial intelligence to allow the creation of expert systems on IBM PCs. At the end of that month, Borland also introduced a modified version of its Sidekick program for the Apple Macintosh computer. After announcing profits of $8 million for the fiscal year ending in April 1986, Borland purchased Singular Software, the maker of a software line for the Macintosh, in July. Four months later, the company made another acquisition when it bought the Click On Worksheet spreadsheet program from T/Maker. At that time, Borland also announced plans to start a new division dedicated to scientific and engineering software.

In June 1986 Borland announced that it would offer shares to the public on the London Unlisted Securities Market, avoiding the high fees associated with selling stock in the United States. By September the company had raised $25 million to fuel further expansion. By March 1987 Borland's sales had reached $29.2 million, and its pre-tax profits were $4.7 million.

Four months later, Borland made its biggest acquisition to date when it agreed to purchase privately held Ansa Software in a stock swap worth $29 million. On the surface, Borland and Ansa were very different companies. Ansa's main product was a high-priced database management program called Paradox, which retailed for $725 and had yet to make its developer profitable. Borland hoped that the merger of the two companies would help to upgrade its own operations in areas where they were weak. Rather than continue to rely on its telemarketing-based operations for sales to individuals, for instance, Borland hoped to make use of Ansa's more sophisticated sales force to peddle both companies' products to large corporations.

Just one month later, Borland unveiled its Quattro spread-sheet program, which was designed to compete with the Lotus Development Corporation's best-selling 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Despite the fact that Lotus had a virtual lock on this enormous market, Borland asserted that Quattro was faster than its competitor's offering and would also carry a lower price. This product was the first of several planned introductions in the field of business applications programs, moving Borland away from its smaller core of original customers, most of whom were programmers, and toward companies. Attracting companies as customers meant Borland would be competing with the large market leaders in the software industry. Kahn hoped to enlarge his company by following "the Honda way." For him, this meant a business strategy of getting into a market with low-priced goods and then expanding market share with more sophisticated and expensive products, in the same way that the Japanese car maker had acted.

To support this move, Borland introduced its first advertising campaign. In addition, the company moved to reorganize its corporate structure on a more formal and professional level, adding several key posts, including a chief financial officer. These efforts came as Borland's initial torrid corporate growth had started to slow. The company earned only $1.8 million in profits for the fiscal year ending in March 1988, leaving it far behind the industry leaders it aspired to join.

Borland's move into the corporate software market continued in June 1988, when the company introduced Sprint, a word-processing program for use on IBM and IBM-compatible computers. At that time, Borland also purchased the programs of Surpass Software Systems, Inc., allowing it to incorporate technology from its rivals' products into its own Quattro spreadsheet program. By August 1988 Borland's efforts in the corporate software market had started to show some results. Quattro had sold more than 125,000 copies in the nine months since it had been introduced, helped by a Borland promotion that offered the product to previous customers at just $79. Monthly sales of Paradox had doubled and had reached 3 to 4 percent of the data-base market since Borland had purchased its maker. Sprint, Borland's word-processing program, had become a best-seller in France, with more than 25,000 copies sold.

Despite these gains, at the end of August 1988, Borland announced that it would lay off 13 percent of its workforce in an effort to bring costs in line with its earnings. At this time, the company also underwent further restructuring, moving its marketing and sales departments away from sales of its programs through catalogues and direct mail to dealer sales.

In the following year, one of Borland's competitors turned the tables on the company. In July 1989, Microsoft announced that it would market a low-cost challenger to Turbo Pascal, Borland's first product.

Two months later, Borland intensified its head-to-head competition with another big software seller when it released Quattro-Pro, a spreadsheet program that was designed to mimic and supplant Lotus 1-2-3 to an even larger extent than earlier versions. Borland's product was more powerful than 1-2-3 and could also be run on older computers with smaller memories. The company hoped to convince corporate customers to buy Quattro-Pro rather than a Lotus upgrade. To persuade them further, Borland introduced an extremely aggressive pricing strategy, as it had earlier done with its Paradox program. Just as Borland had offered Paradox to its competitor Ashton-Tate's dBase customers for $150, rather than its usual price of $725, the company offered Quattro-Pro to former Lotus buyers for just $99, hundreds of dollars less than rivals' prices. In addition, Borland introduced a novel marketing concept, selling its mainstream business products through direct mail campaigns, which kept the costs attributed to dealers or other middlemen low or nonexistent. Following these moves, late in 1989, Borland sold stock to investors in the United States for the first time.

By June 1990 Borland had sold more than 200,000 copies of its Quattro-Pro spreadsheet program, and the company had started to make real progress in eroding the market share of giant Lotus, some of whose programs were plagued by bugs and glitches. One study reported that sales of Quattro-Pro were matching those of one Lotus version, as Borland won converts in small- and medium-sized companies.

In July 1990 the success of Borland's introduction of Quattro-Pro prompted a law suit from its intended target, Lotus. Charging that Borland had infringed its copyright on its software, Lotus sought to make the company alter its product, which accounted for 15 percent of company revenues. As a countermove, Borland sued Lotus in California, hoping to get a favorable judgment. The possibility that Borland would lose this suit cast a shadow over the company's future as the case wended its way laboriously through the courts.

By the end of 1990, Borland's Quattro-Pro shipments had reached 50,000 a month, and the company attained a market share of about 20 percent. In addition, sales of the company's Paradox database program had also improved, doubling to about 20 percent of the market. By March 1991 Borland had seen its revenues double and its earnings rise to $11.8 million over the last twelve months.

On the basis of this growth, in July 1991, Borland took a further step toward becoming a major player in the software market when it agreed to purchase one of its biggest competitors, the Ashton-Tate Corporation, for $439 million. Ashton-Tate's primary product was dBase, a database program that had once dominated the market but had started to lose ground after the company introduced a version of the program riddled with flaws. With the purchase of Ashton-Tate, Borland became the industry leader in database software and one of the top five personal computer software firms overall.

To make its acquisition profitable, Borland moved quickly to bring its own stream-lined management style to the less efficient Ashton-Tate, cutting costs by cutting employees. These measures proved expensive, and Borland was forced to take a charge against its earnings to counteract them. The company ended the year with a loss of $110.4 million. In addition, Borland's purchase of Ashton-Tate brought the company face to face with the integration of two incompatible software programs, because the two companies' offerings could not interact. Despite these obstacles, however, Borland's two database programs retained control of 50 percent of the market, worth $300 million in sales, through the spring of 1992.

Having bought its way into the big-time with its purchases of the makers of Paradox and dBase, Borland saw programs for use with the Windows operating system as the next big opportunity in the software field. Using a new software development tool called C&plus;&plus;, which used object-oriented programming to break tasks down into smaller, more manageable parts, Borland sought to bring Paradox for Windows and Quattro-Pro for Windows to market before its competitors got too far ahead.

In July of 1992, Borland suffered a legal setback when a Massachusetts judge ruled in its long-standing copyright infringement dispute with Lotus that it had illegally copied part of the larger company's program. Anxious to take the case to an appeals court, where it believed it would receive a more sympathetic hearing, Borland announced in August that it had removed the feature in question from its Quattro-Pro product.

In September 1992 Borland began offering Quattro-Pro software adapted for Windows at a reduced rate with its older spreadsheet program, as the company attempted to address customer concerns about the economics of switching between programs. In its database business, Borland's share of the market, which had grown to 65 percent, began to be eroded by the company's postponement of its introduction of Windows versions of Paradox and dBase and by low-priced products introduced by such competitors as Microsoft.

Further bad news came at the end of 1992, when Borland announced that it would lay off 350 employees and take a $35 million charge against its earnings. The company planned to consolidate research and development activities in order to control costs. Three months later, Borland finished out its fiscal year with a loss of $49.2 million on sales of $464 million. In an effort to return to profitability in 1993, Borland introduced a new version of its dBase product, which nevertheless was not adapted for use with Windows. With a decade of striking growth behind it, Borland faced a broad array of new challenges as it peered into the future of the software industry.

Related information about Borland

$309.5 million USD (2004) |
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Borland Software Corporation is a software company
headquartered in California. It is best known for its software
development tools, especially the Turbo Pascal programming tool that has evolved
into today's Delphifact. The
company's personnel then included Philippe Kahn as CEO, Chairman, and President, and
Spencer Ozawa as Vice President Operations in the US, with Niels
Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad based in London. Their first product was
Turbo Pascal, using
the compiler developed by Anders Hejlsberg. 1984 saw the launch of SideKick, a time organization,
notebook and calculator utility, notable for being a Terminate and
Stay Resident (TSR) program.

In September 1987 Borland purchased Ansa-Software including their Paradox (version 2.0)
database management
tool. Borland, under Philippe Kahn's leadership took a position of principle
and announced that they would defend against Lotus' legal position
and "fight for programmer's rights".fact After 6 years of litigation the United States
Supreme Court validated Borland's position and Lotus lost the
case.

Additionally, Borland was known for its practical and creative
approach towards software piracy and intellectual
property (IP), introducing its "Borland no-nonsense license
agreement."

The 1990s: Rise and change

In September 1991 Borland purchased Ashton-Tate, bringing the
dBase and InterBase databases to the
house, in an all stock transaction. Microsoft launched the competing database Microsoft Access and
bought the dBase clone FoxPro in 1992, undercutting Borland's prices. Microsoft
was focused on Borland and it must be noted that today Borland is
the only company still standing among Microsoft's competitors at
that time: Software Publishing, WordPerfect, Lotus and many others are all gone.

During the early 1990s Borland's implementation of C++ was considered superior to
then-market-trailing Microsoft. Also, its development of Paradox, with its
ObjectPAL programming
language, pitted it against software by Microsoft, in particular
Access.

By the mid-1990s, Borland fell from dominance in the software tools
market, with the balance shifting in favor of competitor Microsoft. Rival software
company Microsoft did a much better job of recognizing the changing
market and shipping "adequate" solution that corporations were
seeking and edging out Borland using their dominance with operating
systems.

In October 1994, Borland sold Quattro Pro to Novell for $140 Million in cash,
repositioning the company on its core software development
tools.

Philippe Kahn and
the Borland board came to a disagreement on how to focus the
company, and the Borland board of directors fired Kahn as CEO,
President and Chairman of Borland, a position he had held for 12
years, in January 1995.Kellner, Krey, Jeffers, Parks Kahn remained
on Borland board until November 7, 1996, when he resigned from that
position.Borland press release Borland named Gary Wetsel as CEO, but he
resigned in July 1996.

The Delphi 1
rapid application development (RAD) environment was launched in 1995, under the
leadership of Anders Hejlsberg.

The Inprise years, and name changes

On November 25,
1996, Del Yocam was hired as Borland
CEO and Chairman.

In 1997, Borland sold Paradox to Corel. In November 1997, Borland acquired Visigenic, a middleware
company that was focused on implementations of CORBA.

On April 29, 1998, Borland refocused its efforts
on targeting enterprise applications development, and went through
a name change to Inprise Corporation (the name came from the slogan
Integrating the Enterprise). The idea was to integrate
Borland's tools, Delphi, C++ Builder, and JBuilder with enterprise environment software, including
Visigenic's implementations of CORBA, Visibroker for C++ and Java, and the new emerging
product, Application Server.

For a number of years (both before and during the Inprise name)
Borland suffered from serious financial losses and very poor public
image.

In 1999, in the middle of Borland's identity crisis, Dale L. The "interim" was
dropped a few years later.

A proposed merger between Inprise and Corel was announced in
February 2000, aimed at producing Linux based products, however the scheme was
abandoned when Corel's shares fell and it became clear that there
was really no strategic fit.

InterBase 6.0 was made
available as an open
source product in July 2000. With the reenergized division
under new management, Borland stopped open source releases of
InterBase and has developed and sold new versions at a fast
pace.

Borland made a commitment to the technology of web services releasing
Delphi 6 as the first Integrated Development Environment to support
web services. Now all of their current development platforms
support web services.

C#Builder was
released in 2003 as a native C#
development tool, competing head-on with Visual Studio .NET.
With their consistent profitability, in late 2002 Borland purchased
design tool vendor TogetherSoft and tool publisher Starbase, makers of
the StarTeam
configuration management tool and the CaliberRM requirements management tool. The latest
releases of JBuilder
and Delphi integrate these tools to give developers a broader set
of tools for development.

The rounded-out set of product offerings legitimized Borland's new
claim to the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) market, with
tools spanning the software development chain from requirements,
through design and development, to testing and deployment. Former
COO Scott Arnold took the title of interim president and chief
executive officer until November 8, 2005, when it was announced that Tod Nielsen would take over
as CEO effective November
9, 2005.

In October 2005, Borland acquired Legadero, in order to add its IT
Management and Governance (ITM&G) suite, called Tempo, to the
Borland product line.

On February 8
2006 Borland announced the
divestiture of their IDE division, including Delphi, JBuilder, and InterBase. At the same time
they announced the planned acquisition of Segue Software, a maker
of software test and quality tools, in order to concentrate on
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

On March 20 2006 Borland said that it had
acquired Gauntlet Systems, a provider of technology that screens
software under development for quality and security.

Products

Current products

Borland's current product line includes:

C++
Builder

CaliberRM

Delphi

Turbo
Delphi

Turbo
C#

Turbo
C++

JBuilder

Optimizeit
Suite

InterBase

JDataStore

Borland Enterprise Studio, for C++, Mobile and
Java

Borland Enterprise Server

StarTeam

Together

Silk
products

VisiBroker

Old software, no longer actively sold

Programming tools

CodeWright

C#Builder
(Now part of Delphi)

Kylix

Turbo
Pascal

Turbo
Assembler

Turbo
Debugger

Turbo
Profiler

Turbo C

Turbo
BASIC

Turbo Prolog
(now Visual
Prolog)

Turbo
C++

Borland
C++

Object
Vision

Turbo
Modula-2

Utilities

SideKick

SideKick
Plus

SuperKey

Turbo
Lightning

Applications

Reflex

Sprint

Quattro

Quattro
Pro

Paradox

dBase

Games

Word Wizard (Requires Turbo
Lightning)

Notes

References

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